Chemotaxonomic identification of single bacteria by micro-Raman spectroscopy:: Application to clean-room-relevant biological contaminations

Microorganisms, such as bacteria, which might be present as contamination inside an industrial food or pharmaceutical clean room process need to be identified on short time scales in order to minimize possible health hazards as well as production downtimes causing financial deficits. Here we describe the first results of single-particle, micro-Raman measurements in combination with a classification method, the so-called support vector machine technique, allowing for a fast, reliable, and nondestructive online identification method for single bacteria.